This
is the age of global confusion. Now, more than ever, we have easy and frequent contact with cultures and beliefs that are radically different from ours, yet we are expected to, and expect to, happily coexist.
The advantages are clear. Where we previously relied on those around us to establish our identity and adjusted to fit the conditions, we now have an unprecedented opportunity to define ourselves as we wish to be, and to communicate with those who share our interests, not our proximity.
That was the basic premise of my thesis - and it turned out to bring so much more with it. Initially, I was under the conviction, as I have seen others be, that the internet would be an ideal place to study identities because they could - obviously - only be textual. There was to me no great surprise in the fact that we create relationships, use spatial metaphors or any of the other objects of study that have taken place in the years since the web really caught on. Regardless of the way we meet, and whether it is textbased or face to face, we can only use concepts and notions that we possess.
Hence, those who are surprised by the use of spatial terms in online communities must have been expecting a whole new discourse to have opened its doors. Which anyone who has spent any amount of time on the web will know has not happened. While the internet has given us an enormous number of new options and possibilities, we have grounded these in the already existing discourse and merely expanded this to cover those areas that require new terms.
What came out of my research was a mapping of how our actions online can be placed in an ethical perspective and hence can serve as a foundation for further discussions on how hacking, vira and other online attacks can be placed in a framework of understanding.
